After the girls and their mother left, Allan said to Debbie, “Let’s do some more investigating into Lloyd and Otis. Maybe we’ll find something that might lead to a location for Otis now.”
They had two velour high-back chairs at his desk, and though she had a computer of her own, they did this together, each searching for clues the other might miss. Instead of watching a movie, reading books, or playing video games, this was what he and Debbie loved doing most. Trying to catch the killer out there.
They’d been searching for clues all along, in between visits with the pack members. After they discovered some information about Lloyd’s and Otis’s stints in the army—they’d both been snipers, with nothing remarkable about the five years they’d each served—Debbie began searching for their Facebook pages. Both had listed themselves as werewolf hunters in a LARP group in Helena, Montana. Allan and Debbie knew they had hit pay dirt. They began reading all of the posts about werewolves—how to locate them and kill them. One of the men had said, “If you want to join us, we’re hunting every last one of them down.”
They had hundreds of comments from people who loved the idea of pretending to be werewolf hunters. They also had hundreds of comments from “wolf packs” condemning them for their stand against werewolves.
It all looked fairly harmless, except that Otis most likely had murdered both Lloyd and Sarah. The day that Allan and Debbie had searched Lloyd’s submerged car, hoping to find the driver alive, was the last time Lloyd had posted on Facebook. Even then he was touting his werewolf-hunter status, although he had been a lupus garou for some time.
Just as they found his status comments on the page, Debbie swore, jumped out of her chair, and began stripping out of her clothes. Allan wished she was doing it because she wanted hot sex with him, not because she couldn’t control the urge to shift.
Instead of growling and pacing like she often did until she got her annoyance under control, she jumped back on the chair as a wolf and began reading the comments again. Allan smiled at her. “Tell me when you want me to scroll down.”
And that’s how they did it. Her wolf half wasn’t going to stop her now, and he loved that they could deal with this in a more positive way.
Lloyd wrote: We’ve found a nest of werewolves near Bigfork and have caught one already. I’ve been pumping her for info on where the rest of the pack is. We’ll keep you posted.
And that was the last time he had been on Facebook.
Debbie nodded her wolf’s head, and Allan scrolled down a bit more.
Otis wrote: We’re working on infiltrating one of their packs, and we’ve learned some things we didn’t know. You can drown a werewolf. He’s not invincible. Of course, we all know silver bullets will kill them.
Debbie barked.
“Sarah must have told Lloyd our kind could drown, unless Otis had already killed someone that way,” Allan said. “Although he killed Lloyd with a blunt instrument and then submerged the car. In any event, Otis wrote this before he murdered his friend. Lloyd must not have seen it coming. On the Facebook page, there’s no indication that Lloyd had been turned. He acts as though he’s a hunter and nothing more. There’s no sign that he wanted Otis to kill him for what he had become either. But it appears he knew about our pack.”
Debbie suddenly shifted and began pulling on her clothes. “Because of Sarah. Did she then tell Lloyd her good friend Franny was one? And he told Otis?”
“Good bet if Lloyd was trying to stay on Otis’s good side. But we’ve had protection for Franny, so if Otis thought to locate her again to learn who was in the pack, he’s not going to be successful.”
*
In the three weeks before the phase of the new moon passed, Allan had taken Debbie on several runs as a wolf at dawn and dusk. She was learning the pack’s scent trails and how to get back to the cabin on her own from anywhere they ended up. She was still sometimes aggravated by the sudden urges to shift. At first, he carried a backpack with her clothes in it and remained in his human form in case she needed her clothes. For the first week of the full moon, that had been important. Three nights in a row, she’d shifted at dusk when they were out on a run.
If he had been her, he would have felt just as exasperated. He couldn’t blame her. Having little control over her life was frustrating. He tried to be patient and let her work it out on her own until she could deal with it. He had to because he wouldn’t be with her always. They’d planned so many activities for the week of the new moon, he assumed they’d be dead tired every night. If they could even get to everything she’d planned.